The findings of social anthropologists on the political organization of African tribes indicate that there has been an evolutionary approach to the problem. There are tribal groups which have been without any state but they do have a government-a system of ruler, a kind of judiciary and a pattern of law and justice.
On the other hand, there are tribal groups which have a state as well as a government. In both the tribal groups, there has been the existence of some form of government. The government is either run by the kin gro.ups including family and clan or non-kin groups.
Such a situation does not and did not exist in India. Normally, we have two patterns of state formation. First, there are tribal groups which are endogenous, ruled by the tribals themselves. For instance, the Cheros of Bihar, the Gonds of Chattisgarh, the Kolis of Konkan and the Bhils of western India-all of whom had an endogenous system of kinship.
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Second, there are tribal groups which are exogenous. In this pattern, the non-tribals founded states in the tribal regions extending from Chotanagpur and Orissa (hilly region) to Rajasthan and Gujarat, either in collaboration with the tribes, which was institutionalized in the coronation ceremony, or without it.
Indian social anthropologists have generated enough ethnographic data, mostly on establishments of colonial or feudal rule among primitive peoples, but not on their political system.
In the same manner, the historians have also been unkind to tribals. They have elaborately dealt with the chronologies of the princely rulers or the invaders such as Mughals, but tribal political history has always remained outside their purview.
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The subaltern history, which is a newcomer in the writing of historiography, has not developed to maturity yet. There are some exceptions. Historians like David Hardiman, Gyanendra Pandey and Shahid Amin have dealt with the tribal political system in Gujarat and Bihar. But full length monographic studies are non-existent.
K.S. Singh has made an attempt to study the state formation among Indian tribals. However, he also very strongly feels the lack of political studies about Indian tribes. He observes (1985):
Admittedly, much work has been done on the sanskritization of Indian tribes but we have exceptionally insignificant studies on the tribal political system. The jagirdars surely kept their documents in the form of bahis-state record-but these are limited to the administration of the jagirdars only.
Despite this shortcoming we have some details about the process of state formation among tribal people. On this basis, it must be said that we did not have stateless tribal groups. The states were either ruled by the tribals (endogenous) or non-tribals (exogenous).